Lewson clenched a lean brown fist. “Yes” he added, hoarsely, “I was whipped—but they should have tied my hands first. It was not my fault I didn’t have that man’s life. It was ’most a minute before three of them pulled me off him, and he was considerably worse to look at then.”
There was silence for a minute or two, and Wyllard, who felt his own face grow warm, saw the suggestive hardness in Charly’s eyes. Lewson was gazing out into the darkness, but the veins were swollen on his forehead and his whole body had stiffened.
“We’ll let that go. I can’t think of it,” he said, recovering his composure. “They put us on board the schooner, and by and by she ran into a creek on the coast. We were to be sent somewhere to be dealt with, and we knew what that meant, with what they had against us. Well, they went ashore to collect some skins from the Kamtchadales, and at night we cut the boat adrift. We got off in the darkness, and if they followed they never trailed us. Guess they figured we couldn’t make out through the winter that was coming on.”
So far the story had been more or less connected and comprehensible. It laid no great tax on Wyllard’s credulity, and, indeed, all that Lewson described had come about very much as Dampier had once or twice suggested; but it seemed an almost impossible thing that the three men should have survived during the years that followed. Lewson, as it happened, never made that matter very clear. He sat silent for almost a minute before he went on again.
“We hauled the boat out, and hid her among the rocks, and after that we fell in with some Kamtchadales going north,” he said. “They took us along, I don’t know how far, but they were trapping for furs, and after a time—I think it was months after—we got away from them. Then we fell in with another crowd, and went on further north with them. They were Koriaks, and we lived with them a long while—a winter and a summer anyway. It was more, perhaps—I can’t remember.”
He broke off with a vague gesture, and sat looking at the others vacantly with his lean face furrowed.
“We must have been with them two years—but I don’t quite know. It was all the same up yonder—ever so far to the north.”
It seemed to Wyllard that he had seldom heard anything more expressive in its way than this sailorman’s brief and fragmentary description of his life in the wilderness. He had heard from whaler-skippers a little about the tundra that fringes the Polar Sea, the vast desolation frozen hard in summer a few inches below the surface, on which nothing beyond the mosses ever grew. It was easy to understand the brain-crushing sameness and monotony of an existence checkered only by times of dire scarcity on those lonely shores.
“How did you live?” he asked.
“There were the birds in summer, and fish in the rivers. In winter we killed things in the lanes in the ice, though there were weeks when we lay about the blubber lamp in the pits. They made pits and put a roof on them. I don’t know why we staked there, but Jake had always a notion that we might get across to Alaska—somehow. We were way out on the ice one day when Jim fell into a crevice, and we couldn’t get him out.”